The Department of English has its origins in the Richmond Professional Institute, which in 1968 was merged with the Medical College of Virginia to form Virginia Commonwealth University. When RPI separated from William and Mary six years earlier, in 1962, the department was able to begin to develop degrees. The Bachelor of Science program in English Education graduated its first four students in June 1965. The following month, a Bachelor of Arts degree with a major in English was approved. The first class graduated six students.

In the 1970s, a Master of Arts in English was initiated as a degree program with roots in a joint MA/MEd program. A new bachelor’s degree in comparative and general literature was initiated, sponsored jointly by the departments of English and Foreign Languages. In conjunction with the Department of History, the English department also introduced an interdisciplinary American Studies minor. In addition, the department began its involvement with the Capital Writing Project, one of the 160 sites of the National Writing Project.

In 1983, the Creative Writing Program became a full-fledged MFA program. Five students were enrolled in the first year. Also in the 1980s, the department's masters-degree program was separated from the School of Education. Organized into two tracks, one in literature and the other in rhetoric and composition track, the new Master of Arts in English attracted a diverse range of students—some recent college graduates, some professional educators, some non-traditional or returning students, some international students.

By 1989, the enrollment in the undergraduate major had increased to 300 students, including 90 in the extended five-year program for teachers; enrollment in the two graduate programs reached 80.

By the 1990s, the department enrolled more than 400 majors, making it the fourth largest undergraduate department in the university, teaching almost 5,000 students each semester in 200 sections of more than 70 different courses. Having grown to almost 50 students, the MA program concentrated on enhancing its curriculum. With a limit of 30 students, the MFA program became very selective, drawing applicants nationally and internationally. Faculty member Paule Marshall received a MacArthur Fellowship, the only VCU faculty member ever to receive this prestigious honor.

In collaboration with VCU’s School of the Arts and the Glasgow (Scotland) School of Art, the department began its first sustained international program, the Glasgow Artists & Writers Workshop. The department also entered into a unique partnership with the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation, an organization honoring and encouraging emerging African American writers.

The 1990s also saw the initiation of the Moveable Feast, our graduate student reading series launched in collaboration with the School of the Arts and the nonprofit 1708 Gallery in downtown Richmond. These years also marked the beginning of the Visiting Writers Series in which 6-8 distinguished authors are brought to campus for readings and exchanges with students. At the end of the decade, the department initiated the annual Levis Prize reading to honor its late faculty member, poet Larry Levis.

During the 2000s, the department has continued to expand and develop. In 2002 the national First Novelist competition began, awarding the best first novel published each year. We launched our multimedia journal Blackbird:an on-line journal of literature and the arts . In conjunction with VCU’s School of the Arts, we taught English composition and general education literature at the Shaqab College of Design Arts in Doha, Qatar. Last year, we introduced a southern counterpart to our program in Glasgow when we teamed up with faculty of the School of the Arts to offer a program of study in Peru that took writers and visual artists to Lima and Cuzco and the sacred city of Machu Picchu. Last fall we also initiated our forward-looking interdisciplinary PhD in Media, Art, and Text (MATX) that builds on strengths in our department, VCU’s School of Mass Communications, and VCU’s nationally-ranked School of the Arts. On the VCU campus, last year the department taught nearly 13,500 students in 459 classes; it has more than 600 undergraduate majors and 135 graduate students in the MA, MFA and interdisciplinary PhD programs.  This year a new component of the MFA program will be launched, the Distinguished Writers Series, in which a highly acclaimed writer conducts masters classes with advanced graduate students in a for-credit short course each fall.

From the beginning, the department's faculty have engaged in a series of programs aimed at highlighting their various research and teaching activities.  The Symposium operated during the late 1990s into 2000.  Last year saw the initiation of First Friday, a new series of monthly exchanges.  A history of these series is elsewhere on our department's website.

Today, the department's faculty continues to publish to national and international acclaim and continues to be honored with both regional and national awards (most recently fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation). The department hosts academic conferences as varied as the Victorians Institute, the Southeastern Renaissance Society, and the African Literature Association. Its faculty is known for serving as editors for a number of prominent publications as diverse as  Stand Magazine, Victorians Institute Journal, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture and The Comparatist , winner of the 1998 Best Editorial Achievement Award.

Perhaps most important of all, the department's students and alumni continue to excel, whether in academics (attending some of the country's finest PhD programs), in teaching (in Richmond, across the state and the country, and even abroad), in creative writing (department alumni have topped the New York Times bestseller list), or in whatever they choose to do.

Terry Oggel, Chair
August 20, 2007